Beneath bright stage lights and amid the bustle of production crew cameras, local high school student Jorge Cardenas faced a panel of Latino leaders to pose his question about obstacles Latinos face when pursuing higher education.
Cardenas, a 17-year-old undocumented Latino student at Salesian High School in East Los Angeles, was one person in a crowd of teachers, students and parents at a televised town hall meeting about the educational disparity in the Latino community Friday morning in Ackerman Grand Ballroom.
In 2010, nine percent of students nationwide who received college degrees were Latino, according to the Pew Research Hispanic Center.
The event, co-sponsored by UCLA and Univision Communications, a Latino-oriented media outlet, was moderated by Jorge Ramos, an award winning co-anchor of Noticiero Univision and a former UCLA Extension student.
Univision set up the event because of the company’s desire to promote the advancement of Latinos within society, said Diana Rasbot, senior manager for Univision.
A panel of seven people, composed of leaders in the Latino community and the Los Angeles Unified School District superintendent, discussed Latinos in higher education at the meeting. Questions such as how to overcome academic self-doubts and how to build relationships in college were taken directly from the audience and Twitter via the hashtag eselmomento.
Cardenas, who is considering applying to UCLA, said he was drawn to the event because of the opportunity to learn more about undocumented students in education and to share his own story.
“I thought I would learn something, and give something back … it was a personal duty to represent my community,” he said.
The discussion at the meeting breached such topics as strategies for navigating the educational system and the importance of an educated Latino population for the economic and political future of the U.S.
Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, dean of UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and one of the panel speakers for the event, said that it is important that the education level of the Latino community improve because they make up about 16 percent of the U.S. population.
“There is no future without hispanics,” Suarez-Orozco said.
Chancellor Gene Block, who attended the meeting, said that UCLA has a significant Latino population and is dedicated to increasing diversity in higher education.
“(UCLA) is a public institution in service of community engagement,” Block said.
Some UCLA alumni went to the town hall meeting because they said they felt they were closely tied to the Latino community at UCLA.
“I’m deeply rooted with seeing young Latinos at UCLA pursuing their college education,” said Rasbot, a UCLA alumna.
Rasbot, who is the founder of Hermanas Unidas, a Latina student group at UCLA, said she likes to serve as an example for Latino youth as a woman of color who now has a professional career.
“Growing up in an urban community, I went to public schools and I still made it here,” Rasbot said. “(Latino youth) want to see people of the same color (in professional roles).”
She said she thinks opportunities are available for Latino youth, they just need to seek them.
Rosa Meza, a fourth-year English and Spanish student, went to the town hall because she said she thought it would address issues relevant to her community.
Though she was able to find information about higher education while she was in high school, she said many of the Latino students she knows aren’t aware of the resources available to them.
Meza said she thinks the panel talked about important challenges facing Latino students, but that there are still more issues that need to be addressed, such as how to obtain scholarships and tackle student debt.
For Cardenas, who wants to be a journalist, the town hall discussion reinforced his perspective on the importance of education for his community.
“It was great, seeing the people in charge of everything inspiring us,” Cardenas said.”I really felt like my drive to help those in my situation was reinforced.”
He said he wants to use his future to contribute to the betterment of the Latino community by helping to spread awareness of relevant issues such as immigration reform.
How mortifying to see LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy in the above photograph. A superintendent who has overseen the closure of numerous heritage language and ethnic studies programs in favor of classes aimed at preparation standardized test should not be on a panel discussing the Latino education experience. Moreover, Deasy all but decimated School Readiness Language Development Program (SRLDP) and the LAUSD Division of Adult and Career Education (DACE). These and many more programs gutted by neoliberal reformer Deasy are the very lifelines that many in the Latino community count on to open opportunities for higher education. As an academic community we need to be more assertive in pointing out how individuals like Deasy cause actual harm to students both by denying them their cultural identities, and by reducing them to test scores. At the end of the day, critical thinking skills, particularly ones that explore the reasons behind the exploitations and oppressions they suffer, will serve students far more than filling out bubbles on a Pearson, PLC prepared test.